Alice in Wonderland

Rupert Neelands Antiquarian Book and Manuscript Specialist Alice in Wonderland Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), known to all by his pseudonym of Lewis Alice Pleasance Liddell, Carroll, was born into a high-church Anglican family living in Cheshire, the third aged seven, photographed by Charles of eleven children. His father, also named Charles, obtained a double first in Dodgson in 1860 mathematics and classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and taught Mathematics at his college before marrying a cousin, Frances Jane “Fanny” Lutwidge from Hull, in 1827. Perpetual curate at Daresbury, Cheshire, from the year of his marriage, then from 1843, when his son was aged twelve, rector at Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire, Charles Dodgson was the devout author of twenty-four books on theology and religious subjects. The son was a humourist. He possessed the natural ability to amuse children, and first practised storytelling, versifying, and punning on his own siblings. With this comic ability came the unshakeable gravitas of excelling at mathematics. Like his father, Charles junior read and taught mathematics at Christ Church, taking first class honours in the subject in 1854 and a second in classics. His exceptional talent Charles Lutwidge won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, and he remained a Dodgson at Christ mathematical professor until 1881. Church 1856-60 (John Rich Album, NPG) Charles’s jokes were rather literary or donnish in nature. His pseudonym, first used in March 1856 for publication of a poem on “Solitude”, was a piece of linguistic drollery, a translation of his own name into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus. The two names cunningly inverted were then translated back into English as Lewis Carroll. He enjoyed getting pieces into print. From 1854 onwards, he published poems and prose pieces, games and puzzles, in a string of magazines which included Punch and Dickens’s All the Year Round. A bibliography of over 300 items reflects the great energy and fertility of his mind, as do the 98,721 letters which he sent and received during the last thirty-seven years of his life. As lecturer in mathematics, Charles Charles was also an “inveterate gadgeteer” (ODNB) and problem solver. He devised Dodgson had rooms a travelling chess set with holes into which the pieces could be secured. He loved on the first floor of Tom prescribing or improving rules, and even suggested fairer rules for knockout tennis Quad, Christ Church competitions. A spin off from the Alice books was the “The Wonderland Postage- Stamp Case” in 1889. Accompanied by the pamphlet Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing, this was intended to promote the habit of correspondence among children. Among the games he devised was an early version of “Scrabble”. Alice Liddell as “The His favourite contrivance was the camera. He enjoyed considerable reputation Beggar Maid” by as a collodion wet-plate photographer, acquiring his first camera and lens on 18 Charles Dodgson, c. March 1856, very shortly before the appearance at Christ Church of a new Dean, 1858 Henry George Liddell and his family. The Dean’s habit of being consistently late for services may have made him the model for the White Rabbit. But a growing acquaintance with the three Liddell daughters, Edith, Lorina and Alice, affected Charles’s life much more deeply. On 25 April 1856, while on his way to the Deanery to photograph Christ Church Cathedral with a borrowed camera, he met the three girls together for the first time. Alice, the middle daughter, was then aged four. He noted that they “were in the garden most of the time” but “were not patient sitters”. Their family was also large, eventually numbering ten siblings watched over by their governess, Miss Prickett. Charles first photographed the Liddell daughters with his own camera on 3 June 1856. Their heavy clothing is noticeable in many of his portraits. Like other photographers of the period, he sometimes put his young sitters in more free flowing theatrical outfits. It is a well-known and hardly surprising fact that they sometimes posed nude or semi-nude for him. His 1860 photograph of Alice as a beggar girl was greatly admired by Tennyson (see illustration). Call us today to enquire about an appointment on 01883 722736 or email [email protected] or visit our website www.doerrvaluations.co.uk The Dean’s three daughters became frequent sitters. In 1932 Alice recalled that they never resented having to sit still because of the wonderful stories Charles would tell them and even illustrate with his drawings. Alice, the prettiest, is typically seen in photographs “with short, straight dark hair cut in a fringe, large blue eyes and a strikingly gentle and innocent face” (Sally Brown, editor, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: The Original Manuscript, British Library, 2016, pp.8-9). As his visits to the Deanery increased in frequency, “his emotional attachment to Alice grew and ripened, and for some seven years he lived the charmed life of a cherished friend and sometimes consort to the beautiful, impetuous child” (Morton N. Cohen, ODNB). The literary Alice, the heroine of Charles’s stories, took on a definite life of her own on 4 July 1862 during a boat trip “up the river to Godstow”. Listening to him speak of her encounters with humanised animals were Lorina, Alice, and Edith, now aged from thirteen down to eight. Charles himself was thirty-three. Robinson Duckworth, Edith, Lorina and Alice Liddell another young don, was also present. The genesis of the story was recalled in by Charles Dodgson, albumen print, summer 1858 (NPG). the poem, “All in the Golden Afternoon”, used as a preface to Alice in Wonderland. This describes how the three girls begged to have a story from him. When he had exhausted “the wells of fancy” they demanded more. The poem confirms that construction of the characters and incidents was gradual. “Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:/Thus slowly, one by one,/ Its quaint events were hammered out — /And now the tale is done”. On 6 August, a month after his inspired narration, Charles again took the “the Alice, Ina, Harry and Edith three Liddells” upriver to Godstow. On the way, he seems to have become slightly Liddell by Charles Dodgson, exasperated because only one amusement would satisfy them, a continuation of albumen print, spring 1860 the story. “I had to go on with my interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s adventures,” he (NPG) confided in his diary. The story then passed from an oral to a written stage. At the insistence of his favourite child, he began “writing the fairy-tale for Alice” on 13 November 1862. The tale universally known as Alice in Wonderland was first called Alice’s Adventures under Ground; it was to be a keepsake for Alice, a showpiece in the Decorative title-page to a treasured literary manuscript, Alice’s Ad- Deanery, not for public consumption. ventures under Ground by Charles Dodgson (1863), now in the BL Charles finished copying out the story in his neat “manuscript print” hand on 10 February 1863, leaving spaces for the addition of his own drawings (he was an eager but untrained artist). The attitudes of the characters in his thirty-seven sepia ink drawings were to be carefully followed by John Tenniel, as the illustrator of Alice in Wonderland. Charles portrayed himself as the Dodo, and Lorina and Edith as the Lory and Eaglet. Alice, now ten years old, got the star part. Yet Charles would always deny that his eponymous heroine was the Alice he knew. He certainly decided that his heroine should not physically resemble his “ideal child-friend” (Letters, 561). In his manuscript her portrait with dark, bobbed hair appears at the foot of the penultimate page, copied from a photograph taken at the age of seven. Otherwise the long, fair hair of the heroine could have been modelled on Edith, Alice Liddell’s younger sister. Pen-and-ink portrait of Alice Liddell from photograph on the penultimate page of Charles Dodgson’s The morocco-bound manuscript which Charles gave to Alice in November 1864 manuscript was a substantial part of the book that we know as Alice in Wonderland. It eventually became a book in its own right when a facsimile was published in 1886, late in Charles’s life. In 1928 Alice was forced to sell the manuscript to pay death duties. It then came into the ownership of Eldridge Johnson, and following his death in 1945 was given to the British Library by a group of American benefactors in 1948. Charles kept his word by giving the finished story to Alice for Christmas, but he also broke an intimacy by first showing it to the family of the children’s author, George Macdonald, who insisted he publish. When Henry Kingsley, brother of Charles Kingsley, saw it on proud display at the Deanery he suggested the same thing. Instead of being a finishing point the manuscript became a stage in a continuing creative process, it needed enlarging for the public gaze. Charles took on the cost of publication and chose the Clarendon Press as printers, receiving specimen pages from them in the summer of 1863. Alexander Macmillan, co-founder of the The heroine says goodbye to her feet in one of the author’s Macmillan publishing house, agreed to distribute the book on commission. original illustrations (Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, p.11) Call us today to enquire about an appointment on 01883 722736 or email [email protected] or visit our website www.doerrvaluations.co.uk Meanwhile Charles’s happy relationship with the Liddell family seemed to slowly ice over.

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